A police investigator?

We were going to investigate an incident involving vandalism and a possible pet poisoning at someone's home.

My partner was Giancarlo Esposito (whose name I had to hunt and found thanks to mixedfolks.com), and he was the one who took the lead. That made it a somewhat typical detective story: smooth veteran stuck with a nerdy white guy who's fresh on the job.

In the dream, I seemed to know that our destination belonged to Mark Dominus (author of the enlightenning Higher-Order Perl), and I was concerned that the crime against their property was related to his children being biracial.

The real Dominus lives in Philadelphia, but the setting of his house didn't seem like Philadelphia: instead it was cookie-cutter suburbia. The big house with its ornate, frumpy furniture, rugs, and wallhangings was better suited for someone's grandparents than how I picture him living.

Giancarlo questioned him about their dog as to whether Dominus encouraged some behavior or other. This was the best part of the dream but about which my recall is disappointingly bad. Imagine Philip K. Dick had written The Jerk: Dominus sat back in his chair and followed down a long verbal rabbit hole about the dog actually being a wumpus who believed he was a house but was really something else and how Dominus himself was a cow who imagined being a man but with similar multi-layer misgivings.

I asked smarmily, "Did you get all that in your little notebook?"

He showed us the damage to the nearly floor-to-ceiling picture window that wrapped around one of the front corners of the house. Many of the panes at the top were shattered. I asked if he knew who might have done it, and he remarked about neighborhood kids (who probably wouldn't stay off his lawn and all). Someone speculated that it may have been "random dumbassery."

I look up again and now the window is stuffed with what appeared to be lots of crumpled disposable drop cloth. I asked if he'd like us to help with more patchwork (I was thinking of a tarp on the outside), but he declined saying the guy coming tomorrow would fix it properly.

But I stopped the pain meds a couple of days ago! Where'd that come from?

Helicopters and jets

I looked out a window into my back yard where a small helicopter sat. I think it was mine even though the back yard didn't look like the one at our current house or any where I've lived. Another helicopter was flying very low and slightly erratically so as to jostle my craft with its downdraft. Did I mention loud?

‘I should call the FAA,’ I thought, ‘that's harassing flight.’ (I don't guess they have a game warden at the FAA.)

My neighbor had a small jet in his back yard, and the helicopter was also buzzing it. By this time, my wife was watching the scene with me. Next thing I know, the jet was in the air (must’ve come with the vertical takeoff feature) at about the same height as the helicopter.

“I hope it doesn’t hit the house,” Sam said, but as it flew away, we heard a thud from the roof.

We ran out to the back yard. We didn't seem concerned about the helicopter any longer, so maybe it departed too. The yard and house now seemed to be our current house, and we inspected the roof for damage. Because of the recent hail, we have a nice new roof in real life, but in the dream, the roof was old and faded with a comically ghetto patch-job of all kinds of different materials and colors. For example, in one spot there was a tannish piece of linoleum with a faux tile look next to maybe a tar patch.

Metadream!

Sam and I were walking around in a dark, twisty hall. I had a flashlight but was having trouble keeping up with her. When I caught up (seems as though we were in an elevator), she told me she'd been evading me and planning to leave me in this place where no one would find me.

Such disturbing dream-moments jolt me awake. I sat up in bed, and Sam was sitting there with the lamp on. She asked what was wrong, and I told her about the dream. I don't remember going back to sleep.

I woke up this morning and realized I must have dreamed that I was dreaming.

This one involved my family and Batman

My son, another young boy his age, and Batman were cruising around in some kind of aircraft. They land in a field, and somehow, either he snuck back on or never disembarked, my son and the other kid take the plane for a joyride.

Batman didn't seem too concerned about their safety vis-à-vis piloting the craft, but he did worry about an enemy detecting them. He muttered that they needed to stay above the clouds. Imagine the most out of control drunk driver: he weaves badly, but in only two dimensions. Now picture the same in three dimensions.

I heard a narrator's voice-over, and he dissed the plane's construction, calling it a converted hovercraft, which sounded much more humble than it does to my conscious ear. Around then, the plane split, as though in an evasive mode, with two halves of the cockpit rocketing in separate directions, and what remained fell to the ground.

The narrator commented on the construction of the trailer that the plane's debris destroyed, somehow reinforced, but the thing had been crushed like an empty beer can on the side of the road.

My wife comes into the picture, and she was distraught because she thought our son had died in the crash. Several friends of ours were trying to comfort her, but it wasn't working. Sam lashed out at one, accusing her of not understanding because her daughter is a homeschooler, false in both reality and the dream. I tried to calm her and explain that her accusation was unfair, but she was hysterical.

Another day at the office

I was at work.

In the dream, it seemed like I knew I was still working AMPS, but I don't remember thinking it explicitly. How does that work? Maybe I inferred it because the layout of the building was sort of the same except the walls and floors looked sparkling new. In real life, the building was on the demolition list, but they didn't have the funds to tear it down. "Let's move AMPS there!" said some kind soul. Believe it or not, it was a step up from being next door to the laundromat and auto shop.

So I'm at work standing in the hallway by Robert's office that leads outside to the loading area. I see my wife turn the corner off the main hallway. (The connecting hall was much longer in the dream than in the real building.) Soon after, this little skunk comes sauntering behind her. I don't use that as a cliché: it was grinning cartoonishly and had a happy-go-lucky bounce to its step.

I alerted my wife: "Sam!" This startled the skunk. I remember hoping it wouldn't spray, but it lowered its head, stuck its butt in the air, and shot a stream of blackish liquid in a nice upward arc just as an unknown black guy turned the corner. Poor guy: wrong place, wrong time.

Next thing I know, the little critter is chasing me, but I had a plan: I knew I was near a kitchen or break area with two doors close together in a corner — openings in both adjoining walls — and I was going to weave around through the doors to confuse the skunk. This would have been about where Bo's office or the bathroom was, but the real building has no such room.

So I do the weave thing and end up retracing my path down the hall that opened to my office, toward where I was when the dream started. Now a married couple Don and Karen were in the hall holding open large black garbage bags intending to catch the skunk. I ran past them (not sure how: the real hall is narrow), and the skunk ran into one of the bags. They tied up the bag, and Don said something about what to do with it — I can't remember what.

The guy who walked into the stink remarked that he'd been following the skunk, so it must have lost his scent. This made me think of a principle illustrated in an episode of Mr. Wizard's World where he blindfolded a kid, placed a bottle of vinegar under her nose, and told her to say when she thought he'd taken the bottle away. Even though the bottle was still under her nose, she thought he'd removed it. The technical name for this phenomenon is olfactory fatigue.

Oh Lucy, I'm hooome!

I got home from work and was telling a grandmotherly figure about my day. I said something about an issue with a wiki, and she said it was important to get the thing fixed.

Thinking back, I don't recognize the layout of the house, and I don't recognize the Latino woman who spoke with an accent. I knew her in the dream.

There was some issue about a check she had given at church that day. I assumed she had been to Mass because it was a workday, and she was probably Mexican. (I am not Roman Catholic.) She was on the phone trying to call a woman at her church about it when I got home. She was frazzled because of this and because of a baby somewhere in the house who was calling out unintelligibly. A few times, she raised her voice to be heard and to say she'd be there soon.

As I left the front of the house, I passed by a kitchen on the right where a Latino guy about my age was doing something. Again, I knew him in the dream, but I'm not sure what our relationship was. I thought about saying "Buenos dias" but didn't because I wasn't sure whether the greeting was linguistically appropriate.

Making two left turns, I got to what I assume was my bedroom. I think I emptied my pockets there but don't remember specific items. I could still hear the baby calling, but being closer didn't make it sound any less odd.

I go into the room in the back of the house on the right where the baby was, and he was barely floating face-up in an inflatable pool on the bed. "Oh my God! C----!" I shouted. I did recognize the baby: he was an infantized version, but a big baby, of my friends' son. He was bobbing and made his weird noise when his mouth surfaced. I ran over to him. His face was smurf-blue but not all over, as though his part of his face had been dipped in paint.

I sat him up, and he threw up a couple of times in the water. First a little bit and then a thin-milkshake gusher.

That's when I woke up. As I sat reflecting, I could still hear the baby's noise: something was partially obstructing one of my nostrils, making a faint whistle-wheeze.